From Zelda to Donkey Kong, the Best Video Game Hacks

Playing Super Mario as Pauline? Wedding proposals by homicidal AI? That's just what happens when gamers hack into today's most popular video games.

On March 9, Mike Mika did something simple, yet revolutionary: he swapped the Mario and Pauline sprites in the video-game classic Donkey Kong, allowing his young daughter to play the game from the female's perspective.

Although the hack was relatively "simple" - Mika had to draw custom sprites for Pauline as she jumped, wielded hammers, and climbed ladders - simply empowering female gamers won praise from around the Internet. It also continued a debate among gamers that had begun before Tomb Raider made the busty Lara Croft the protagonist, continuing with Anita Sarkeesian's recent Kickstarter campaign to discuss recurring female stereotypes in video games.

Hacks within video games aren't new, dating back to the original GameShark and Game Genie, which provided cheat codes that allowed infinite lives, access to special items, and other tricks. iD's DOOM and its sequels introduced gamers to the notion of third-party, homebrewed add-on levels and "total conversions," such as Aliens TC. Those mods have become accepted today, with whole teams of amateur designers creating everything from modified older games with updated graphics to complete derivatives of existing games.

Today, there's a real push-pull relationship between game hacks. Why? Multiplayer. Because for every Natural Selection (a modification of the original Half-Life) there's a crew of aimbots helping those gamers with them installed to pwn their online opponents. Installing a mod on a PC game may be a way to improve a game like The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Try that in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 on an Xbox 360, and watch yourself get banned, quickly.

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Mario Adventure

Mario Adventure

From last year's story on classic video game hacks comes Mario Adventure, a completely new Mario adventue from the ground up - which has nothing to do with Nintendo. While most hacks simply change graphics, sounds, and levels, the author of Mario Adventure modified the Super Mario Bros. 3 game engine itself, which resulted in amazing effects like the ability to switch between two power-ups while playing, weather and day/night cycles on every board, and the ability to save coins to buy power-ups from Toad.
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